One safety-problem in aviation is that aircrafts during take-off or landing occasionally overruns the available run-way and ends up in the terrain behind the run-way. There are several examples of such accidents with catastrophic results both in terms of material damage and loss of lives/seriously damaged health of persons involved.
It is identified a range of possible causes for such accidents, such as late discovery of mechanical failures of the aircraft making it necessary to abort the take-off, aircraft break failures, unexpected weather incidents, pilot errors etc. The wide variety of causes behind overruns makes it unlikely that it will be possible to introduce measures to entirely avoid these situations in aviation.
Thus, to alleviate and avoid the severe consequences of overrun situations, it is necessary to provide run-ways with means for capturing and/or slowing down aircrafts overrunning the run-way in a safe manner. For air-fields with plenty available space behind the run-way, one obvious answer is simply to prolong the run-way to allow the aircrafts ample space to stop by use of their brakes or reverse engine power.
However, many air-fields do not have available space to make a sufficient prolongation of the run-way, and there are also incidents where an overrun is caused by malfunction of the aircrafts braking systems. It is therefore advantageous to provide airfields with one or more means for exerting an external deceleration force on aircrafts overrunning the end of the run-way, and which is able to force the aircraft to stop at a deceleration rate which is tolerable for the mechanic construction of the aircraft, especially the landing gear, and the persons onboard the aircraft.